An Eye On The Weather

A good portion of the northwest got some very welcome precipitation over the weekend and with it the hope that we may be headed out of a drought. Nic Loyd with WSU's AgWeatherNet says to not get your hopes up too much.

LOYD: It certainly was nice. I was checking out some of the webcams earlier today. Places like Paradise at Mount Rainier had some snow cover this morning which is certainly a good sign but as I often say, there's going to be variability day-to-day, week-to-week this winter but overall the indicators are not good. At least from my perspective.

Loyd says that he expects slightly below normal precipitation this winter.

LOYD: But I think because of the temperature function, the mountain snowpack, when we look next spring is probably going to be pretty low which is not a good thing at least for Central Washington irrigators.

During this weekends storm heavy rains caused flooding in some areas even though the ground did the best to soak it all up.

LOYD: Just because you have some promising weather doesn't mean that the indications are necessarily that there's going to be even normal snowpack say by next spring. It's certainly nice that some of the elevations, especially above 5000 feet had some snow later Sunday but it's certainly not an indication that it's going to be a snowy or promising winter or anything like that unfortunately.

And that's Washington Ag Today. I'm Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.